


In Which Ducks Are The Glue That Holds Society Together

by laughingalonewithducks



Category: Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: M/M, coffee-shop au aw yiss
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-02
Updated: 2012-12-02
Packaged: 2017-11-20 02:19:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,015
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/580204
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/laughingalonewithducks/pseuds/laughingalonewithducks
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Crowley runs a coffee shop. Aziraphale runs the bookstore next to him.</p><p>Strangely enough, they've never met.</p><p>A story of lattes, hot chocolates, alcohol and ducks.</p><p>(also known as This Fandom Needs More Goddamn Coffee-Shop AUs)</p>
            </blockquote>





	In Which Ducks Are The Glue That Holds Society Together

**Author's Note:**

> And here you can see my love affair with the comma. ~~If this is wrong, then I don't wanna be right.~~
> 
> Also you can see how incredibly bad I am at writing coffeeshop AUs.
> 
> Oh well. This fandom needed more coffee, and I was locked out.  
> (Spiders are really good at stimulating the creativity process, apparently.)

To be completely honest, Crowley had never really noticed the guy running the store next to him. Sure, they were neighbours and all, but it wasn’t like he ever brought business in, and the only glimpses Crowley ever caught of him were through the dusty old windows of his bookstore.

That all changed, however, when Crowley added hot chocolate to the menu.

Well. It didn’t _all_ change. The world kept spinning, everyone who wasn’t Crowley and didn’t buy coffee from his shop was completely unaffected, and no mysterious singing purple slugs popped up in the middle of the desert (although how anyone would ever connect Crowley’s choice in beverages to alien life on a completely different continent was anyone’s guess). Even Crowley’s little coffee shop stayed the same. What _did_ change, however, was Crowley’s general outlook on ducks, bookstore owners and his ability to stay in a relationship with someone who wasn’t either dead or Helen Keller (or both).

They say you will always remember the moment you meet your other half, but Crowley only had vague memories of that day. This is possibly because it took absolutely bloody _ages_ for him to realise that he actually _had_ an ‘other half’. He remembered choking on the latte he’d stolen from himself because the angel from that one painting over in the Louvre had somehow become living flesh and was _standing in his store_ , but aside from that, he remembered nothing. Not even the date.

The next time the angel had walked into his shop, however, was probably the clearest memory he had from those times. He’d learnt that the angel’s name was Aziraphale (and, by extension, that his parents probably hated him and he was bullied at school), that he was completely human (obviously), that he liked his hot chocolate with a _shit-ton_ of sugar, and that he worked right next door. Most of these, strangely enough, fitted almost perfectly in with Crowley’s view of bookstore owners (i.e. that they were all boring hermits with weird names that probably never drank).

He didn’t see Aziraphale for a month after that. Which turned out to be just enough time to realise that he was acting like a love-struck teenager over someone that he’d met twice only (not including that time when he’d tried to get to know his new neighbour and been glared out of the store), and wasn’t even his type. Possibly.

(Crowley had never really thought of himself as having a _type_. There wasn’t really room to be picky when all you had were one-night stands picked up from who-knows-where, or the occasional friends-with benefits arrangement.)

So Crowley had picked himself up off the metaphorical Floor of Vaguely Romantic Teenage Angst, slapped himself around a bit, and told himself to stop being a bloody idiot. And then Aziraphale had come right back in, apologising for disappearing for so long (even though they’d only met twice), and all of Crowley’s hard work flew right out the window and he was right back to not being entirely sure if he was in l- _really really liked_ the guy, or his constant aura of faint bemusement just did funny things to Crowley’s head.

The next few times Aziraphale entered Crowley’s store were almost exactly the same. Crowley continued to be one-part love-struck teenager, two-parts irritable bastard, and Aziraphale continued to look vaguely confused about everything. Stilted small talk was made, embarrassing silences were had, and Crowley was starting to get really fed up with the whole mess. So, figuring that a simple offer of friendship would have absolutely no negative consequences whatsoever, he asked if Aziraphale would possibly be free that Friday to go feed ducks. Which was actually rather strange in and of itself, because Crowley _hated_ ducks. A terrifying incident in his childhood involving a duck, an octopus and a rather dented bicycle had left him with a deep-seated hatred of all things aquatic.

Aziraphale accepted his offer, which was even stranger, especially seeing as he’d only seen Crowley a handful of times over the past three months, and really, when someone in flash sunglasses and a suit asked you to ‘feed ducks’ with them, you really had to wonder what the phrase ‘feeding ducks’ actually meant in that context. Which meant Aziraphale was either incredibly oblivious and/or trusting, or that he was perfectly aware of Crowley’s confusion and simply did not give a flying fuck. 

One Friday turned into two, and two turned into a whole two months and a possible duck-feeding tradition, which Crowley didn’t protest nearly as much as he should have, considering. And obviously Aziraphale felt that five months was a long enough period of time to get to know someone, and invited him into the bookstore’s back room to ‘get horribly drunk’ on New Year’s Eve. Which kind of destroyed Crowley’s ‘people who work with books are teetotallers’ idea, but he was too busy trying to get horribly drunk while not destroying any of the apparently priceless books in the back room and explain the biology of dolphins to their owner.

And then the countdown finished, and he was kissing Aziraphale and this was wrong, he shouldn’t be doing this, he’d just become friends with the guy and now he’d gone and ruined it, he’d ruined _another_ relationship, him and relationships never mixed ever, and _oh_ , Aziraphale was kissing him back, that changed _everything_.

And the next morning, when Aziraphale had put up with his hangover (bastard had put away almost twice as much as Crowley and barely had a headache; his liver must have been made of bloody titanium or something) and still showed no sign of remorse (or even letting him forget about it), Crowley had looked at him making coffee (bought for him, too; Aziraphale never touched the stuff) and thought, _I can do this._

(And two years later, when Crowley had finally succeeded in getting Aziraphale off of his shitty couch in his dusty back room and into Crowley’s nice, clean, hygienic apartment, he’d looked at him and thought, _yeah, I can do this_.)


End file.
